Food legacies: playing the culinary feminine

This article explores the role of the “culinary feminine” in arts practice and popular culture. Tracing a genealogy of significant British female food personalities and female performance artists working with food, I locate my artistic practice inside the “gap(s)” in between these dual culinary and artistic legacies. British television cook Nigella Lawson and her media image as a domestic goddess is used to examine how representations of food and women are produced and performed in popular culture. I argue that Nigella constructs ‘paradoxical femininities’ and exists outside the parameters of traditional women-food boundaries. This article documents my trilogy of performance works that re-appropriated strategies used by Nigella, combining contemporary arts-practice with a popular cultural food aesthetic, through which I trace the gaps that arise in my own food-practices as a woman/artist/consumer.